Thursday, February 19, 2015

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Actor

Eddie Redmayne is the frontrunner for Best Actor for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything.

Each day as we make
our way to the Academy Awards ceremony Feb. 22, Last Cinema Standing will take
an in-depth look at each of the categories, sorting out the highs, the lows,
and everything in between. Check back right here for analysis, predictions, and
gripes as we inch toward the Dolby Theater and that world-famous red carpet.

Best Actor

Best Actor is easily the most stacked category every year,
with a ton of worthy contenders and too few spots to put them in. This year,
for instance, you could put together a list of great performances that would
make a tremendous list of nominees without including a single one of the actual
nominees. As a thought experiment, here is my alternative list: Jake Gyllenhaal
for Nightcrawler; Timothy Spall for Mr. Turner; Brendan Gleeson for Calvary; David Oyelowo for Selma; and Phillip Seymour Hoffman for A Most Wanted Man.

I could go on like this all day with Oscar Isaac in A Most Violent Year, John Lithgow in Love Is Strange, Joaquin Phoenix in Inherent Vice, Ellar Coltrane in Boyhood, Aleksey Serebryakov in Leviathan, and on and on and on. The
point is that while the five nominated performances are each fantastic in their
own right, the Best Actor category at the Oscars is only the tip of the iceberg
when it comes to the best performances of the year. It is not just this year
either, as similarly long lists could be made for any year. If you want to talk
about Best Actress, it could fall the same way, though the contender field
there is often unfairly narrow, and that is a good discussion to have another
day.

What we have, then, are the five performances Academy
members liked best, and all credit to them, they liked some damn good
performances. Maybe most remarkable is that four of the five nominees,
including the two frontrunners, are first-time nominees. None of these actors
has won an Academy Award before. In fact, this is the only acting category this
year not to feature a previous winner. The last time not one of the nominees
was a previous winner was in 2006, so no matter who wins, it will be a
history-making night for someone.

Michael Keaton for Birdman – No one in the Best Actor category
this year had the same task as Keaton. While the other four nominees were all
playing real people – meaning they had books, interviews, videos, etc., to base
their performances on – Keaton created a whole new person from just the words
on the page. Great words though they may be, they mean nothing without Keaton’s
incomparable contribution. He is the heart and soul of Birdman, the burning fire at the center of the film. His
performance lends poignancy, gravitas, and humanity to an otherwise caustically
satirical endeavor.

Keaton is Riggan Thompson, not because of who he is in life
but because of who he is as an actor. Keaton is not great as Thompson because
he once played Batman and Thompson once played a Batman-like superhero called
Birdman. A lot of actors have played superheroes at one time or another, and
more now than ever before, but no other actor could have brought the deep wells
of pain and anguish that Keaton brings to the part. This is not a case of stunt
casting. It is an instance of casting the perfect actor in the role of a
lifetime.

Keaton embraces all of the flaws and contradictions of a man
who just wants to be seen as an artist but who has a history of selling out
that goal. Every time he walks on stage, he takes with him the hurt of a failed
marriage, a washed up career, and a lack of respect. Birdman does not tell the story of a man overcoming all these
grievances but of a man who finally channels these grievances into the art he
so desperately wishes to make. The words of the writers create this world, but
it is Keaton who makes them fly off the page.

Eddie Redmayne for The Theory of Everything– In a
relatively brief career, Redmayne has been involved in a number of highly prestigious
projects, including Tom Hooper’s Les
Miserables, My Week with Marilyn,
and The Good Shepherd, but perhaps
none has carried more inherent prestige than this biopic of Stephen Hawking. For
The Theory of Everything, Redmayne
takes on the unenviable task of portraying a famous and beloved figure who is
still very much alive and very much in the public consciousness.

Redmayne handles the project by going above and beyond the
call of duty and does not so much play Hawking as become him. He has the look,
the walk, and the attitude of a man whose body keeps him trapped but whose mind
takes him places the rest of us could not even dream about. Characters with
disabilities have always been seen somewhat derisively as Oscar bait, but
Redmayne does not attempt to milk Hawking’s motor neuron disease for pathos.
Instead, he treats it as a fact of life to be dealt with and overcome so that
he may attend to more important matters.

In the film’s best scene – and one of the best scenes of the
year – Hawking becomes frustrated that he cannot keep up with the pace of a
dinner with friends and excuses himself from the table. He attempts to climb
the stairs but collapses. He cannot go up or down. Then, he sees his son
standing at the top of the stairs behind a safety gate, but the son does not
seem as locked in as Hawking in this moment. He tries to reach out to his
child, but he cannot connect with him. Redmayne is able to show us this
haunting and tragic moment with his body, but he makes us understand it with
the longing and despair on his face.

Bradley Cooper for American Sniper– Cooper is the only
previous Oscar nominee in this group, and he has been nominated in three
consecutive years – for Best Actor in 2012 for Silver Linings Playbook, for Best Supporting Actor last year for American Hustle, and this year. It has
been a kind of remarkable career transformation for Cooper, whom many of us
first took notice of in The Hangover,
though if you are a David Wain fan, you were enjoying Cooper’s comedy chops as
far back as Wet Hot American Summer
in 2001.

American Sniper
was a passion project of Cooper’s, something he has wanted to bring to the
screen for years. He chased it through numerous directors and production delays
until he and director Clint Eastwood were finally able to bring the story of
Chris Kyle to the screen. Cooper’s passion behind the scenes is clearly matched
by his dedication on screen, as he transforms himself into a U.S. Navy SEAL.

Cooper has charisma to burn, but here, he channels that
energy into a man who has a deep love for his country and an abiding need to
defend it but for whom the horror of war gradually begins to take its toll.
Cooper looks appropriately warrior-like in his action scenes, but when you
watch him at home, that is where the real work appears. Cooper absolutely
embodies a man who leaves a piece of his soul on the battlefield every time he
goes out and who must fight to keep what he has left when there is no more war
to fight.

Benedict Cumberbatch
for The Imitation Game –
Cumberbatch’s Best Actor case is an interesting one. On one level, he is
fantastic in the film as mathematics genius and British war hero Alan Turing,
but on another, taken out of the context of The
Imitation Game, the performance feels like another in a string of recent
performances by actors using the same set of tricks to portray a character who
is clearly on the autism spectrum. Cumberbatch, himself, does a riff on the
autistic genius who does not get along so well with people on his television
show Sherlock. It is a trope that has
become commonplace in modern storytelling, so how to judge Cumberbatch’s work
here?

Objectively, it is an undeniably solid performance. Given a
character who has difficulty showing emotion and who lives so much inside his
own head, Cumberbatch communicates a world of feeling and soul simply with his
body language and facial expressions. Really, Cumberbatch is marvelous as
Turing. The problem is that Turing is not a well written character in the film.
Because the character shows little depth, writer Graham Motion does not imbue
him with any. Whatever depth we sense in Turing is thanks to Cumberbatch’s
excellent portrayal.

Steve Carell for Foxcatcher – Let’s try not to make
this about a comedic actor impressing everyone by going dramatic. In the first
place, it has been done before with great success, and more than that, Carell already
has a demonstrated facility with dramatic acting, even in ostensible comedies
such as Little Miss Sunshine and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.
So, it would be great if we could all stop acting so surprised Carell was able
to pull off such a magnificent portrayal of a mentally disturbed millionaire in
Foxcatcher. He is a great actor, and
that is what actors do.

John du Pont, as played by Carell, is a man devoid of either
heart or soul. His ghostly pallor suggests a body drained of blood. What he
subsists on is power, and he wields it like the only weapon he has. He is an
impossibly careful man who speaks with a slow, deliberate cadence and does not
so much walk as shuffle. Appearances are everything for him, and the worst fate
that could befall him is to be perceived as weak or incompetent. Carell
embraces the character as only a gifted actor could and pulls the nearly
impossible trick of making a wealthy psychopath understandable, if not
sympathetic.

The final analysis

It will be Keaton and Redmayne down to the wire, and
Redmayne has a slight advantage, having won the Screen Actors Guild award and
the British Academy of Film and Television award. Each won a Golden Globe –
Keaton in comedy and Redmayne in drama. Early in the season, some thought
Redmayne and Cumberbatch might split the British genius vote, paving the way
for a Keaton win, but Cumberbatch’s campaign never materialized. Now, some are
theorizing that Keaton and Redmayne may split the vote and clear a path for
Cooper to win.

I never have really subscribed to the idea that a split vote
could lead to a surprise winner. For that to be true, the third candidate would
have to have as much support as the two leaders without losing any votes to
them. The math just does not seem to work. I would love to see Keaton onstage
accepting an Oscar. It would be one of the highlights of my night. However, all
signs point to Redmayne winning for his transformative portrayal of Hawking,
and it is hard to argue with that.